The Cutting Edge Gadgets Guide

Your Weapon Expert loadout and weapon choice sounds reasonable. Staff -> One-Handed Cleave is a short combo that does good damage. It came in third place on my sustained DPS group melee tests. Bow Smoke Bomb does a little bit more sustained damage than Staff Cleave.

When it comes to duos, the first person that gets to the mob groups first is generally going to be at the top of the scorecard. It also helps if your main damage rotation is very short.

I think most Gadgets players probably use a Play-From-The-Tray build. Gadgets Weapon Expert does excellent damage in melee combat. However, there are a lot of places in raiding content - especially in Elite - where it is very difficult to play in melee range. Gadgets Ranged Weapons Expert damage potential generally falls behind Gadgets Ranged PftT in those situations.

One thing I have been doing lately is utilizing the Bootility Belt and all 4 Boo Trinkets. At the CR 220-224 range, the Boos do 5.1k damage per second in group situations.

Don't be afraid to mixup your loadout and try different powers. Gadgets has a lot of powers that are situationally powerful and it takes experience to know when to swap them in. For your Weapons Expert build, I'd suggest trying out Holographic Decoy. It is a lot easier to do Weapon combos if the bad guys are attacking the decoy and not you.

If you are wanting to do "Competitive DPS," you'll need to install mods at some point. As our CR increases, modding becomes even more important. This is especially true for the Power stat. Power Costs increase at a faster rate than what you'll get from gear.


EDIT:
If you are playing Weapons Expert, you may want to consider having two armories. One is dedicated to doing group damage with the other being used for single-target situations. For Single-Target Weapons Expert, I got good damage out of this spec:

Weapon: Martial Arts Uppercut Mastery
Loadout: Cryo-Field, Battle Display, Taser Pull, Robot Sidekick

Just clip every Uppercut attack with Taser Pull.

The smokebomb WM is the buzz right now but....what's the best RANGED Weapon as of now? Setting aside competitiveness only viability.

Looking at my test results, probably Dual Wield. DW Explosive Shot came in second on ranged group damage. DW Flurry Shot was tied for first on ranged single-target damage.

Handblasters are also quite good. HB Explosive Shot came in first on my ranged group damage test. Pulse Beam came in a distant second place for ranged single-target damage. Pulse Beam is also good for rebuilding Power and generating Supercharge.

I never have found a Gadgets Ranged Weapons Expert loadout that I've been happy with. Your basic powers on a ranged loadout are going to be Battle Display and Robot Sidekick/Suppressor Turret. Trying to clip any of the weapon attacks listed above with a ranged power generally results in a small damage loss.

It would be nice if Gadgets had a Field-type AoE. Cryo-Field was converted to a field-type AoE for a couple iterations of the Gadgets revamp, but was eventually converted back. Here is an example:

This is from the latest PC Test patch notes:

Here are the fine details for both powers:

Heat Vision
Currently on Live
Four ticks of 62-69 (262 cumulative average) over 3 seconds. Twelve ticks of 1-3 (24 cumulative average) over 12 seconds.

Change on Test
Five ticks of 27-30 (142 cumulative average) over 2 seconds. Twelve ticks of 1-3 (24 cumulative average) over 12 seconds.


Neo-Venom Boost
Currently on Live
Boosts Weaponization Skill by 10, base Defense by 100%, and all Damage output by 45% for 15 seconds.

Change on Test
Boosts Weaponization Skill by 10, base Defense by 90%, and all Damage output by 40% for 15 seconds.


That's a pretty big nerf to Heat Vision. Running some simple parser tests comparing a Taser Pull versus Taser Pull/Heat Vision rotation, the results came out almost identical. At CR 221, I'm seeing these results for single-target for a PftT build:
Taser Pull only - 6200 dps
Heat Vision followed by 4 Taser Pulls - 6250 dps
Taser Pull with Stealth->Surprise Attack - 8200 dps
Taser Pull, Stealth->Surprise Attack, Fear Gas - 8600-9000 dps

I'll update the Guide notes once this goes Live.

Thanks for the testing on HV, see Penryn the aggressive Obsidian approach to balancing works more often than not hounding them about telsa/arc/CB and Berserk in that thread and its next on the list for the hotfix

Stealth will be on my next things to do list

Be careful what you ask for. The easiest "fix" would be to make Stealth a non-beneficial power and I don't think anyone wants that.

I don't think they would take that approach as a band-aid, stealth as been crucial staple to a dps since the gadgets AM days needing a extra loadout spot for supers/damaging powers same with mental. Mental's Invisibility has always worked the way I wanted stealth to, Invisibility I could comfortably hit up to 4 powers without it dropping, I could menace-mass terror or menace - mass hysteria - mass terror easily without worry of being kicked out early, where stealth has always felt like a strong breeze would knock me out. Now its almost unsable but we have to use it. Invisible dove-tail animations clipping you out of stealth and being locking powers for 12 seconds like that's crazy

Thank you for testing this out so quickly. Really appreciate it.

Quick question, how much of a difference in damage should a melee LO do compared to a ranged one?

Doing some more testing this morning, Heat Vision is alternating between doing 4 and 5 big ticks of damage. A reliable 5th tick would bring its average cumulative damage up a bit. Still, spamming Taser Pull seems to be as effective right now. Heat Vision seems like it would be good for helping to quickly finish off low-health single targets.

Are you asking about Multi-Target or Single-Target? What do you consider to be "melee" within the context of your question?

Single target and multi. And to me outside the range of emp is a "ranged" ability. Like taser pull for example.

I'm terrible with words and explaining things sorry.

I'm going to assume you are playing from the tray. Since we don't have any details about your loadouts, I'll try to speak in the general sense.

Single Target
I'll assume you are using Taser Pull, Heat Vision, Stealth, and maybe one other ability here. Your melee and ranged damage should be roughly the same for single-target. You just need to move in close enough once every twelve seconds to use Surprise Attack. If you can't move into Surprise Attack Range, you'll see a roughly 25% decrease in your damage output.

Multiple Targets
Generally speaking, you'll see about a 35% decrease in damage output if you are using a pure ranged loadout versus one that incorporates high-cost melee abilities.

The overall damage reduction doesn't seem to be very large when considering how long the cast time is for live versus test, especially if you get that fifth tick. Seems roughly about 10% based off of your cumulative averages. What's puzzling is the cooldown, so it doesn't seem to be nearly as worthy to have in rotation since taser pull spam likely puts out slightly more damage overall in a parse anyway. I'm not on test, so this is just based off of what you've presented.

The new Heat Vision is pretty similar to the damage a "<= 35% Health" Photon Blast does. The base damage and timings are fairly similar. That is what makes me think it is good for finishing off low-health enemies.

Anything that has a 4+ second cooldown is always awkward to work into a loadout rotation. The timing just doesn't line up with anything else to promote any sense of fluidity. Just due to the long cooldown and short cast times, you're just as well off spamming Taser Pull.

I'm going to assume the Iconic changes are going to be released to Live today. So I've updated the guide with the latest Heat Vision and Neo-Venom Boost information. I also updated the descriptions for some other abilities.

In case any PftT players are feeling lost with the changes to Heat Vision, this is what I was trying out on Test:


The basic rotation is 3x Taser Pull followed by Fear Gas. When Stealth comes off cooldown, clip your second Taser Pull with Stealth->Surprise attack and then use Fear Gas.

On the Gadgets bug front for Live, I saw an odd graphics bug the other day involving Neural Neutralizer and Bastion. I was playing with a Mental Controller that was using Bastion at every available opportunity. What I noticed is that Neural Neurtalizer shield visual FX very rarely appeared while this was happening. Usually I would just constantly see the Bastion VFX whenever I cast Neural Neutralizer.

Another odd bug I've been seeing the last couple of days is that Battle Display will fire the first time I use a Gadgets power when zoning into an instance. I don't even have Battle Display on my loadout and I'm not sure what it is triggering it.

I'm not feeling it lol. I never used Heat Vision but the 5% loss on Neo Venom isn't too big.

So I have 3 amories currently:

Superpower, multi-target
Weapon Expert, multi-target
Hybrid, controller

Thinking about getting a 4th for Superpower single-target but at the same time i figure i can swap out abilities before a boss fight.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

Being able to swap to a single-target armory is invaluable.

Sometimes you won't have a chance to swap powers before a boss fight. There are times where you'll be stuck in combat for the duration of the instance. There have been lots of times where the UI didn't register my power swaps and I was stuck using my multi-target setup.

anyone use a first come, first served loadout vs a rotation loadout ?